


i can still hear your voice (i don't have no choice)

by asvmmershower



Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: M/M, and alex is all fuming and it gets sad, basically that scene from the book, bc we know our mans was Pining, from henry's pov, where henry is like Newsflash Asshole Ive Been In Love With You This Entire Goddamn Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 18:21:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19278859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asvmmershower/pseuds/asvmmershower
Summary: henry is trying to convince his brain that he's not in love with alex, and it's not working. the deliverance of one fsotus on his doorstep seals his fate.(or i'm awful with descriptions but henry is sad, pining and impossibly in love).





	i can still hear your voice (i don't have no choice)

Henry first hears the yells from his bedroom, sipping tea whilst he looks out onto the night sky spitting rain. The knife in his stomach twists a little harder when he realizes that he’s probably read this book scene a million times.  
The tear stains on his face are a little dried out now.  
It’s raining outside, and some hooligan is yelling outside, and he misses Alex so much it physically aches. He thinks back to all the stolen moments they had together, the times he got to see him laugh and smile and moan and lie on the pillow next to his. He thinks about how he’s never going to get to see that again.  
That almost makes the tears come back. Instead, he takes another scalding sip of tea to pretend the fire in his chest is from that and not the hurt he’s built up inside.  
The past few days have been awful. When he got back from America, he went on autopilot mode – didn’t let himself feel any emotion. Just numbness. Dragging himself from meal to meal and then bed, where he doesn’t sleep. If he lets anything in now, it’s going to tear him apart.  
He knows that Alex was going to tell him those big three words, and it splinters him apart because he wants to say them back so fucking bad. He’s been in love with Alex Claremont-Diaz since the first day he met him, spends his every waking moment trying not to think about him, would wrap him up in his arms and never let him go if only the world would let him. The crown and his international fame don’t mean anything to him. Just the boy who kisses him with so much passion it leaves him breathless and cares about him so much in a way nobody else ever has.  
(In a way no one else ever will).  
But he thinks it’s better for both of them to be kept apart, knows that the world will never let them love each other in the way he so desperately wants, knows that love doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme of things. Gran will find him a nice, proper girl to marry. He’ll become the perfect, heterosexual heir to the throne he was born to be. One day, the images of soft, floppy brown curls and a smile so wicked yet so achingly beautiful will leave his mind. He promises himself that.  
The screaming outside is still going on, still drowning out all of his thoughts, and he’s mildly annoyed by now. He looks out the window and –  
His heart leaps into his throat.  
Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t grab that shirt and throw it on in your haste to get to the door. Don’t leap down the stairs so fast David yips at your ankles. Don’t let Alexander Claremont-Diaz worm his way back into your fragile heart. Don’t do any of this, Henry, don’tdon’tdon’t.  
He ignores every word floating through his brain, doesn’t let himself focus on anything except the man that he loves so much he hurts, mere metres away from him. He tries to convince himself that it might not even be Alex, but it’s pointless trying to pretend. Henry knows.  
This is only a formality. Alex has come to dump him for ghosting him for a week, and once he’s over, he’ll go back home again, to half-hearted flirts that will kiss him with half the passion that Henry holds. At least whoever Alex dates next won’t have to keep it a secret. At least they won’t be the fucking Prince of England.  
Henry chokes back a tear-edged laugh. That’s the only good thing to come out of this, for Alex at least. Because at the end of the day, he just wants Alex to be happy. That’s all that matters at the end of this. He hopes whoever gets the privilege of loving him peacefully makes his eyes twinkle in the way that drives Henry crazy, gets everything that makes Alex so incredibly, impossibly beautiful.  
He gets to the door, hears Shaan yelling, and pulls it open.  
“For Christ’s sake, Alex, what are you doing?”  
Alex stops whatever he’s saying, looks like a deer in goddamn headlights, and he’s absolutely dripping with water, and Henry just wants to grab his hand and pull him away from everything that’s ever happened to them.  
But the set in his mouth and the anger in his eyes… Well, that’s Ellen Claremont’s son for you. “Tell him to let me in.”  
“It’s fine. He can come in.”  
Except Alex does come in, does follow him up the stairs, and Henry can’t say anything because if he does everything will be revealed. And maybe he’ll tell this stupid, gorgeous boy that he loves him. And he can’t, he can’t love him, not now and not ever, and he feels like there’s a coil of barbed wire around his throat, like nothing will ever reach the pain of this.  
“Really nice,” Alex is yelling at him now, and he wishes he could muster the energy to tell him how much it hurts. “Fuckin’ ghost me for a week, make me stand in the rain like a brown John Cusack, and now you won’t even talk to me. I’m really just having a great time here. I can see why y’all all had to marry your fucking cousins.”  
“I’d rather not do this where we might be overheard,” Henry says. He turns towards his bedroom.  
Alex follows him up, yelling so loud he’s worried all of the stupid, old dotty maids will come to investigate. “Do what? What are you gonna do, Henry?”  
Henry shuts the door and turns around to face Alex, and he knows how perfectly clear all of the hurt in his face probably is, and some part of his brain that exists on entirely another planet wonders just how he managed to fall in love with someone like this. Because all he wants to do is grab Alex and never let go.  
“I’m going to let you say what you need to say,” he says with no emotion, so he can pretend there is none, “so you can leave.”  
“What, and then we’re over?”  
Henry doesn’t answer. He thinks if he forces his mouth open he’ll start crying.  
“Seriously? What the fuck is going on? A week ago it was emails about how much you missed me and meeting my fucking dad, and that’s it? You thought you could fucking ghost me? I can’t shut this off like you do, Henry.”  
That’s the final fucking goddamn straw. Something snaps within him. The idea – the very idea – that he’s the one that can shut this off, as if Alex isn’t the sun his planets orbit around, as if he wouldn’t sacrifice everything for one idiotic first son. He’s been falling in love with him since fucking Rio and this – this beast has the audacity to suggest that this is all just a casual hookup for him.  
He simultaneously wants to punch and kiss him. He considers both.  
Instead, he paces. “You think I don’t care as much as you?”  
“You’re sure as hell acting like it.”  
“I honestly haven’t got the time to explain to you all the ways you’re wrong—”  
“Jesus, could you stop being an obtuse fucking asshole for, like, twenty seconds?”  
“So glad you flew here to insult me—”  
“I fucking love you, okay?”  
Everything in him starts to break. The steady veneer he’s tried to put up for this entire, short conversation, the hurt that builds within his bones, the longing for Alex’s bed hair and morning breath.  
He thinks back to the first time they kissed. Under those trees in the garden, his veins pumping alcohol and liquid gold, knowing that every action he took from there would be irreversible. He thinks back to the second time, more risky, just for the thrill of it.  
He let himself pretend this was a hedonistic display of youth, blowjobs when they were drunk, only letting himself fall in love when they were apart over emails where he’s bared his entire soul. But this isn’t them glorifying the alcoholism of youth. This is his heart. And Henry is in irreversible love, and he cannot be under any circumstance, because he promised himself it’d never get this far.  
Alex is still talking, the words barely registering in his brain, which is trying to make sense of it all. “Fuck, I swear. You don’t make it fucking easy. But I’m in love with you.”  
And he has no idea of what he’s just said. Henry removes his signet ring, starts massaging his hand. “Do you have any idea what that means?”  
“Of course I do.” As if Alex isn’t the First Son of the United States of America, and Henry isn’t the goddamn Prince of Windsor, and this is a world where they have the plain privilege of being normal.  
And Henry can’t say it back, because that was the one step he promised to never take. Sleeping together was fine, but falling in love wasn’t part of his carefully crafted plan.  
Alex throws a letter at him, one that he slipped into that poncho, that he vaguely remembers writing months ago, and shouts at him. “Then what is this supposed to mean, if you don’t want this?”  
Henry sometimes wishes he wasn’t so obsessed with classics and their old texts, old loves. This is one of those moments. “Alex, Thisbe and Pyramus both die at the end.”  
“So this was all never going to be anything real to you?”  
At that, his entire body splits apart and launches into another hemisphere. This stupid, stupid boy. “You really are a complete idiot if you believe that. When have I ever, since the first instant I touched you, pretended to be anything less than in love with you? Are you so fucking self-absorbed as to think this is about you and whether or not I love you, rather than the fact I’m an heir to the fucking throne? You at least have the option to not choose a public life eventually, but I will live and die in these palaces and in this family, so don’t you dare come to me and question if I love you when it’s the thing that could bloody well ruin everything.” Every part of his body is shaking, and he thinks this is the part where he collapses.  
“It was never supposed to be an issue; I thought I could have some part of you, and just never say it, and you’d never have to know, and one day you’d get tired of me and leave, because I’m—I never thought I’d be standing here faced with a choice I can’t make, because I never … I never imagined you would love me back.”  
And through all of the hazy kisses and glasses of alcohol and emails that left his everything bared, stuff he’d never planned on telling anyone, through the smiles and the tears, through wrangling his team around just to see Alex even for a few moments at a time – he never had planned on the one thing he never let himself dream of.  
“Well,” Alex says, “I do. And you can choose.”  
So stubborn, so wrong.  
“You know bloody well I can’t,” Henry says, with a humourless laugh.  
“You can try. What do you want?”  
You. His brain short circuits at that. He’s not allowed any of this and he’s not going to even try to pretend otherwise. He’s not going to set himself up for – for this lifetime of hurt.  
“I want you,” He says, wishing he could grab the words back as soon as they enter the air. Alex says something back; he doesn’t even hear it. “But I don’t want this.”  
Alex looks like he’s about to murder him. “What does that even mean?”  
“I don’t want it! Don’t you bloody see? I’m not like you. I can’t afford to be reckless. I don’t have a family who will support me. I don’t go about shoving who I am in everyone’s faces and dreaming about a career in fucking politics, so I can be more scrutinized and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life.”  
His breath comes in ragged gulps, his eyes flashing with all of the built up hurt residing within him. “I’m allowed, all right, and it doesn’t make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don’t get to come here and call me a coward for it.”  
This conversation isn’t even registering anymore. He can’t let himself continue to get hurt like this, so he lets the words flush over him. Until Alex says it.  
“Fine.” His voice is a choked, bitter sob. “You know what? Fucking fine? I’ll leave.”  
That stupid laugh is bubbling up again. “Good.”  
“I’ll leave,” and Alex spins around and pins him to the spot with those dark, soulful eyes, “as soon as you tell me to leave.”  
He’s so done with this. He’s so done. “Alex.”  
Alex has somehow wormed closer, and Henry can feel the heat of his breath and the skin prickling on the back of his neck, and all he wants to do is lean forward. “Tell me you’re done with me. I’ll get back on the plane. That’s it. And you can live here in your tower and be miserable forever, write a whole book of sad fucking poems about it. Whatever. Just say it.”  
He’s too far gone to reconsider any of his actions at this point, so sick of trying to pretend like he’s not in deep, deep love, and he grabs Alex’s collar. “Fuck you.”  
“Tell me to leave.”  
He slams Alex backwards into the wall with so much force he’s worried he’ll break him, kisses him desperately with everything he has left in him, and well – he’s too far gone at this point to even try pretend otherwise to anything.  
He kisses Alex until he tastes blood, kisses him until he feels the tears bubble up and leave his chest. He knows that he should push him away and put him in a taxi and send him back home and pretend that none of this happened.  
He doesn’t have that kind of energy anymore.  
When Alex fucks him, he feels like he’s in a soap opera, every emotion carefully overperformed to pretend to an audience, all the real ones hidden away. He hides his face away inside Alex’s wrist, studies his face with blown irises until he’s memorized every goddamn freckle on his face, counts his love in wipes of fingers over tear-stained cheeks and limbs muddled together so he doesn’t know where he starts and Alex ends. He knows this is the last time. He knows. He knows. He tries to convince himself, so hard.  
The only thing he can let himself do is memorize every inch of Alex’s perfect goddamn face, every centimetre burnt into his mind, so when he leaves for the final time, Henry will always be able to remember. He can’t forget. He won’t let himself forget someone this important.  
They’re both worn out by the end, and Henry only has the energy to pull the blanket over them before he’s knocked out, sleeping better than he has in years.  
When he wakes up the next morning, the sun sneaks in just enough tip golden sunlight all over Alex’s face, and he takes a minute to simply just stare at the beauty lying before him. The man he loves. The man he will always love.  
Alex is still fast asleep, whistles of snores leaving his mouth. Henry sits up, careful not to disturb him, noticing with a twang how their hands are still entwined from the night before. He lifts their tethered fingers to his mouth and presses a careful kiss to their hands, determined to make sure Alex sleeps as much as possible, knows they’re both insomniacs of the worst kind.  
He looks down at the mussed hair, the soft, pink lips, the cheeks creased with the rumple of the pillow underneath him. He tries not to cry again at how in love he is, ghosts a finger over Alex’s cheek, careful not to wake him up.  
With the new burst of… something that he has today, he pulls out his runners and sweatpants. Maybe a run will clear his head. Maybe a run will give him the perspective that he needs to decide what to do. It all comes down to that simple, simple thought – can he let himself love Alex?  
That question can wait, for when the sun comes over the horizon and Alex gives him a sleepy, towheaded smile that will make the decision all the more worth making.  
All he knows, as he looks back at the boy sleeping so peacefully that he never wants to stop looking, is that he’ll never not love him, as much as he tries to pretend otherwise. All he knows is that whatever decision he makes will change the course of their lives forever.

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first fic i've ever written (hopefully more to come!!) and was not proofread At all so feedback appreciated!! :D i'm aware it's not great but i'm in exam season rn so. you know. title taken from thinking bout you by ariana grande because that is The Most alex/henry song


End file.
